The biggest difficulty we had to resolve, and as yet to refine, was that the user should not be considered from a single library but part of the entire system. Thus he can borrow from any library even if each has different norms governing the length and number of books on loan. Each library was also asked to use only two status for each book, either on loan or out of loan which in some cases meant they had to change their internal norms.
Another organisational problem arose from the material on loan which was not found in the archives. This meant instructing the personnel in charge of loaning to load an initial description of the work and to indicate this book for a complete semantic analyses on its return. Regarding the use of the bar code, we decided, apart from a newly established library, to insert these when the book is on loan for the first time. The codes are pre-printed and are registered on the holding module when they are fixed to the book.
The need to change the circulation policies meant we had to modify the copy status of all our database records. Thus it was important to create a procedure to convert data before uploading them with util 65. Speaking of such, as changes are always needing to be made, we feel it is important to have a util which allows parts of the COPIES.DAT file to be withdrawn for limited corrections. All of the data concerning the students, teaching members of staff and administrative staff (approximately 19,000) were taken from the administrative database converted and loaded using UTILS 65 and 64.
New uploadings at fixed intervals should keep the database up to date. We have been unable to keep to the original estimated time span due to the problems we have encountered finding a badge decoder that allows us to switch from one band to another. The badges which the students already possess are registered on band one, whereas, public libraries' badges and the Italian tax badge, which we intend to use, are registered on band two. A scanner would allow us to firstly register and then compare the bar code labels of each volume.
The problem concerning books which cannot be found using the computer database has been increasingly felt since the start of circulation. With regard to the retrospective cataloguing of volumes for which no type of cataloguing is available, or is not satisfactory, we would like to try using the cataloguing derived from the OCLC database. For our card catalogues we are testing a retroconvertion using the scanner. In the first trial phase, groups of students on short term contracts, selected the records which were not present in the computer database and scanned these. An HP scanner with a 600 dpi (even if the use of a lower resolution appears to be more functional) a set of extended characters, and the OCR/IR software Recognita Plus was used for text recognition. The library staff worked on the subsequent analyses of the records, using the software Malachia developed in Visual Basic and working under Windows, especially produced by the Neotecnica firm from Verona. This allows the text to be coded in the form needed for loading in Aleph. Recognition of the record structure occurs automatically using the (ISBD or RICA) punctuation or in non standard cases, the person who is doing the cataloguing can select the contents of each field with the mouse. Loading in a special sub-library facilitates corrections to standardise the data to the correct authority file, before the final uploading to the main database.
Guido Badalamenti